Tag: Fritt Vilt

Life has a funny way of messing with your plans, and this weekend was no exception.

My steady progress of watching a horror flick a day during October went awry on Friday when my Mum was taken ill. What with one thing and another, it took me until Monday the 20th to get back on the scary wagon, unless you count watching the “Strictly Come Dancing” results with Mrs Rolling Eyeballs as suitable horror fodder.

With a semblance of normality restored, I sat down to watch the sequel to “Cold Prey” – “Cold Prey – Resurrection”.Following a model established by “Halloween 2”, this follow-up to the 2006 fright-fest is set almost entirely in a due-to-close hospital. Jannicke (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) is brought there after being found wandering in the snow, having killed the backwoods mountain man who murdered her friends in the first movie. Traumatised by her experiences, she’s horrified to learn that police have recovered the bodies of her friends and the killer, who awakes in the hospital determined to finish what he started.

“Cold Prey” wasn’t a horror film which reinvented the genre, but it showed a commendable commitment to establishing character and location, a trait which this sequel also displays. It’s at least half-an-hour before the mayhem truly begins, with the stories of the hospital staff, patients and local police force all having moments of character development before the Mountain Man rises from his slumber and stalks the corridors anew.

The second movie in the series – a prequel, “Fritt Vilt 3”, came out in 2010 – builds on the strong points of the first film and concentrates on delivering a series of tense set-pieces. There’s a particularly effective police breach sequence in which the characters actually behave like sensible rational people (before getting diced six ways to Sunday). If you’ve ever shouted at the screen whilst watching a horror flick, wondering why people going into the big scary house don’t wait for back-up, then this film will satisfy your desire for protagonists with two brain cells to rub together.

That said, there are certain inescapable tenets which the slasher sub-genre has to adhere to and the climactic showdown in “Cold Prey 2” is no exception. Having spent the majority of the running time in civilisation, the end of the film sees the villain and our heroines – we get two Final Girls this time, Jannicke and hospital doctor Camilla (Marthe Snorresdottir Rovik) – hopping on a snowmobile and tracking the Mountain Man back to his remote hotel lair to finally vanquish their warmly-clad foe.

As a sequel, “Cold Prey 2” does a decent job of providing a briskly delivered cocktail of scares and thrills, also finding time to pencil in some of the back story hinted at by the first instalment. Fans of Nordic Noir might even enjoy the sequence where the local chief of police pieces together how come so many skiers and snowboarders seem to disappear in the mountains – I thought that I was watching a cop procedural drama for a couple of minutes.

Overall, this is a satisfying horror movie, albeit one which seemed to ramp up the violence and gore in a way that the original movie didn’t seem to feel was necessary. If that’s a turn-off, please feel forewarned, but don’t miss out on a decent example of the modern European horror thriller.

After the relatively dull and by-the-numbers fare of “See No Evil”, today’s movie “Cold Prey” came as a welcome surprise.

Though constructed from the classic slasher playbook – a gaggle of young people, an implacable killer with identity obscured, a compact locale – “Cold Prey” (or “Fritt Vilt”, in its original Norwegian) is a refreshingly direct and well-made horror thriller which uses locations to great effect and often wrong-foots even the most experienced scary movie fan by making smart choices and allowing the characters to act plausibly and consistently.

The plot is simplicity itself – five young snowboarders hike out into the Norwegian wilds to rip up the pure white powders of an unspoiled peak and find themselves out of their depths when injury forces them to take refuge in an isolated, apparently deserted hotel. As this is a horror picture, the hotel is anything but isolated and has an unwelcome member of staff not best pleased by the peppy quintet’s sudden trespass.

So, not that dissimilar to “See No Evil”, then? If you’ll forgive the pun, it’s all in the execution. Whereas that film tried to make us care about a largely hateful group of teen axe-fodder, “Cold Prey” dares to spend a good half-hour establishing character and relationships before putting the cast in death’s clammy grasp so that we give a hoot about the group when our masked menace starts to thin the herd.

Of chief note is heroine Jannicke (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) who is quite the most resourceful heroine that I’ve seen in my horror film viewing this week. Without being a magazine-swapping, neck-snapping femme assassin par excellence, she takes charge of an increasingly insane situation and courageously marshals her friends in an effort to keep them away from an abrupt, icy demise.

Director Roar Uthaug’s film is successful in that it doesn’t waste time or insult your intelligence. The gore is restrained – perhaps too much if you judge a fright flick on the number of exploding heads featured within – and the thrills are well-judged and expertly-staged. The plot more or less makes sense (bar rather opaque motivations on the behalf of the film’s slasher) and the whole affair is rounded up in a compact 97 minutes.

You may see better horror movies this Halloween, but if you have any love for the stalk-and-slash sub-genre, you’ll find it hard to find a recent effort which betters “Cold Prey” in it’s command of the essentials